


Officer in the Machine

by straydog733



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-12 09:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7097290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straydog733/pseuds/straydog733
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 3 AU: Things take a turn for the absolute worst aboard the shuttle, but Doug discovers he has another way out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“There’s still so much you have to do, Officer Eiffel.”

“I _can’t_ , Hera. I just…I literally can’t. I’m broken.”

The bleeding had started about an hour ago. He was no stranger to blood in his mouth these days, but this time it wasn’t coming from his receded gums or frost-bitten tongue. It was floating up from his throat, in thick bubbles to hover in the air around him, more each time he coughed. Even he had the good sense to know this was the end. At least it was a friendly delusion that had chosen to wait with him. “I’m sorry, babe.”

“Doug, you’re not broken. Your body is.”

“Says the figment of my imagination.”

“I mean it. And I’ve always thought bodies were very overrated.”

“I’d say not to put down my squishy meatsack, if it wasn’t being so squishy right now…But Hera, I’m not like you…I’m stuck in this body.” Looking at the empty walls of the USS Hellscape didn’t feel that different than talking to her back on the Hephaestus. A bit of familiar scenery to go out on, even if he didn’t get to talk to the real her. “I’m tired. I hurt. Just…please let me sleep.”

She didn’t respond and Doug closed his eyes. He wanted to hear her voice one last time, but this was what he had asked for. Some peace to go out on. Radio silence. “Goodbye, Hera,” he whispered, and he wrapped his arms around himself and floated in his flying coffin.

“Did you think Rhea meant so little to me?”

Lovelace’s voice was sharp in his ear and his eyes scrunched shut. No. Not her.

“There’s nothing left I can do, so leave me alone. No slapping me on my death bed.”

“Rhea was my friend and my companion,” she pushed, so close she had to be right next to him. “Do you really think I was going to leave her behind? That Fourier and I didn’t make space for her?”

Doug opened his eyes. Lovelace was leaning in over him, staring directly into his eyes.

“How?”

“I don’t know. You don’t know, so how would I? I’m just saying…it’s worth a look.”

Straightening his body back out hurt like hell, joints and bones grinding as he moved. But his brain buddies hadn’t led him astray so far. Even if just to shut her up, he’d look.

And there it was. If he hadn’t spent so long working on the shuttle’s hardware with Lovelace, he probably wouldn’t have recognized it, hadn’t noticed it on his initial search. But the storage space was there.

It wouldn’t have held Hera, with all her sprawling brains. And he wouldn’t be awake, there wasn’t the processing power. But there was storage.

It was basically what he was already doing with the cryostasis, just a step further. He could set an automatic distress beacon, leave instructions on the computers; hell, he could stick a post-it to the screen. Communications Officer Inside, Do Not Erase. And the only other thing to do would be wait, a sentient message in a bottle drifting in a big empty ocean.

It made as much sense as anything else. And maybe, just maybe, it would hurt a bit less.

-/-

-/-

-/-

-/-

-/-

He was not aware of anything. Then he was.

He was aware of sound and images. He did not open his eyes, but he could tell there were images, right in front of him, things to see. But he didn’t know how to make sense of them. Not like he was looking at some outer space Picasso, but like his eyes weren’t talking to his brain.

Did he have eyes?

Something clicked into place, some circuit was completed, and he was looking at a series of shapes. Another click and he recognized those shapes as being connected. Now it was a human. Now it was a woman.

Then a million things unlocked at once and he knew that of the hundreds of women he had seen in his life, this image did not match any of them. She was a stranger, leaning in and looking at him. Or at part of him? He could see her back too, and her left side, and her right, her top and her bottom. But part of him was looking at her face.

There were sounds. Another series of noises that took several steps to coalesce into meaning. After a moment he connected the movement of the woman’s face, the part that was her mouth, to the sounds and knew she was speaking. In a language he knew. The language was English and she was speaking words.

“Hello in there. Can you hear me? You’re waking up from a bit of a nap, but are your speech processor’s working? We patched you into the Urania’s hardware, so you should have a voice box at your disposal. Can you say hello?”

Collecting the individual sounds, translating them into words, stringing the words into a sentence, every piece was its own step. And once the sentence was together, realizing what the whole thing meant. Then how it was related to him; it was a greeting. And then deciding to respond. Deciding how to respond. Choosing the word. Translating how the word could become sound. Then discovering, what felt like a million miles away, a part of him that could turn that concept of a sound into a sound clicked on and came to life.

“Hello.” It took less than a second, but he felt every minuscule, incremental step deep inside his mind.

“Hi there, friend, glad you could join us. My name is Dr. Alana Maxwell. Do you have a name?”

Another million steps in an instant. Did he have a name? Was he a person who had a name? Was he a person? Thousands upon thousands of scraps of memory of being called things, most of them the same. Yes. He had a name. He could say his name.

“My name is Communications Officer Doug Eiffel of the USS Hephaestus.”

Time was strange. Time was all sorts of strange. But he could still tell that she paused for a long moment.

“Hi Doug…Say, you wouldn’t have any relation to that dead body we found with Officer Doug Eiffel’s ID in the pocket, would you?…Yes? No? Maybe?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doug is just getting the hang of his new brain when a call from home shakes things up.

The days while the Urania traveled through the void were strange, but useful. The initial shock of being in contact with so many things at once was starting to dull and he was able to let his mind stretch. Maxwell gave him access in bits and pieces, widening his space like moving a horse to a bigger and bigger pasture. He could sense the places where his access ended, not quite like walls but just places where his mind dropped off and stopped existing.

 _Where the Sidewalk Ends. Shel Silverstein. A dozen black and white drawings in his head all at once_ , and he had to stop and let the flood of information slow down for a minute. 

He wondered if his days of pop culture references were over, or if he’d eventually get used to the new way his memory worked and be able to reference with the power of a hundred Doug Eiffel’s. That would almost make everything worth it, right? And poking around at the harmless programs Maxwell was letting him see, he could tell that he’d finally be able to give Hera a run for her money in Pong, not to mention kick Minkowski’s ass in chess.

That had to be a better aspect to focus on than the mother of all out-of-body experiences from a couple days back, watching Kepler and Jacobi ready his body for transport. Their cryopod was a lot fancier than the shuttle’s, but Doug still cringed to see them cram his limp bag of bones into it. He had asked if they could skip the pod, maybe begged a bit, but Kepler just shook his head.

“I really do hate to go against a fella’s last wish, especially when he’s there to see me do it, but it could take a while to make contact with the Hephaestus.”  
“And we’re not gonna drive around with interstellar roadkill cooking in the back,” Jacobi had helpfully contributed.

Doug could see the value there. Seeing his face slack, his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest and strapped down so they didn’t float free...it was almost unreal, but at least he wasn’t looking at maggots in his head yet.

 _Corpse Bride, Tim Burton, a green worm popping out of an eyeball to make jokes, Peter Lorre parody, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds._ Doug clamped down hard on his brain to stop it running away from him and focused his attention outside the ship. Space and stars were a bit simpler to process than 33 years of consumed media.

The optics systems aboard the Urania were top of the line. He had never seen inside the Hephaestus’ mind, but he could still tell the difference in how smoothly information flowed into his head, since Maxwell had given him eyes on the outside. Though “eyes” was really a terrible word for what he had. The sensors and cameras and probes were more impressive than anything his old orbs of flesh and jelly could have done, in some ways he couldn’t even begin to explain. 

For just one aspect, Roy G Biv went out the window. Both ends of the color spectrum had pushed outward and stars threw off colors he didn’t have the vocabulary to even start describing. Whatever they were, they were vibrant, thrilling and beautiful.

Except for that one shade of whatever that reminded him of dog vomit. Not everything could be super poetic.

Far off in the distance there was a flare of energy that looked different from the others. Like it had an edge to it, maybe? Something different from the stars and rocks littering his immediate vision. He turned his focus back inside the ship and watched Kepler, Jacobi and Maxwell cluster around a computer console. At the same time he was watching their relaxed but martial shoulders from behind and their stern faces from a few inches away, along with a dozen other angles. Along with the empty quarters, dining hall, storage bay, bathrooms, and broom closets. Along with all of outer space, looking out from all directions. Along with everything going on inside his busy brain as well.

That wasn’t a useful path to go down right now. He focused as hard as he could on their faces in front of the computer and what that computer was saying. He could have a Beautiful Mind moment later.

 _RussellCroweGladiatorJoaquinPhoenix_ \- stop it, Doug.

The ship’s optics had only detected a flash of radiation in the distance, but the long-range scans had a whole wealth of extra information. Echoes from mechanical discharges, predicted positioning of the station versus where it had actually ended up, a solid wall of readings about the crazy radiation being pumped out by Wolf 359. And a radio signal. Maxwell had not given him access to the communications yet (making him a pretty sorry excuse for a communications office at the moment), so she was the one who opened the connection and filled the cabin with a female voice, distorted by static and flat with boredom. But still very, very familiar.

“Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. Canaveral. This is an urgent distress call from Lieutenant Commander Renee Minkowski on board the USS Hephaestus Station…”

“Well whatta you know, we’ve got a lively one out there,” Kepler said, slapping Jacobi on the shoulder and grinning at Doug (or at the most-visible camera on the console, which everyone seemed to look at when they talked “to” him). “Now that’s gotta be a welcome sound for you, Officer Eiffel.”

“Yeah, I...yeah, it’s good to hear her.” It probably wouldn’t be good to explain that he’d heard her plenty while on his own, that he’d heard all of them. Doug wondered if downloading himself had gotten rid of the delusions, or if they would be back the next time he was left alone. But that was probably something to worry about on another day. “How long until we...do you know when we’re going to get to the Hephaestus?”

“We’ve passed the first star on the right,” Jacobi snarked, turning away from the screen (not that that stopped Doug from looking at his face). “Now it’s just straight on till morning.”

_PeterPanCaptainHookHookRobinWilliamsRuffio!-_

“I just-”

“We’re close, Officer Eiffel,” Kepler said. He placed his hand against the wall by the largest camera. The equivalent of a shoulder? “Should be another two, two and a half days at this speed. But don’t worry; we’re going to get you home.”

“And only in a few different pieces.”

“That’s enough, Jacobi. Start preparations for contact.”

“Yes, sir.” Jacobi pushed off of the wall and floated to another console. Doug had never noticed how strange people looked moving in 0g. Well, he had noticed it at first and then gotten used to it, and now it was strange all over again seeing it from the outside. Being grounded while everyone else was floating free.

“I’ve got a few more bits of software to install before we make contact with the Hephaestus,” Maxwell said, already pulling up files. He felt- or maybe it was more that we was aware of- the packets of information moving without yet being able to see inside them. Maxwell started an installation and one burst open like a firework sparking outward through his mind. “By the time we get there, you’ll be years ahead of your friend Hera.” When he didn’t respond she laughed and batted a hand at him. “Oh don’t worry, I’ll work on her too. I wouldn’t want either of you to be getting jealous.”

“Right. Good. That’ll…that will be nice.” He probably should have been more concerned about a doctor fishing around inside him. Again. But hearing Minkowski’s voice, talking about Hera, just having the ship on the sensors…it was all starting to feel real. It was starting to be a real possibility that he was going back.

In a few different pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minkowki's message is taken from Episode 29: Pan-Pan.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hey guys. It’s me...sort of.”

Hera gasped while Lovelace and Minkowski were still looking around to see where his voice was coming from. Doug was contained inside the Urania’s computer, but allowed to connect with the Hephaestus on a surface level. He could feel a smooth wall just against the end of his mind, and then a jagged, rough expanse where the Hephaestus began. Parts of it sparked and others felt gray and fuzzy against the extensions of his electronic brain. But here and there, scattered across the pitted technological landscape, were points of real connection. He had rudimentary access to the audio arrays. He could see things through the optics of the Urania’s docking collar, a narrow window onto the bay of the Hephaestus.

And he could feel her.

Doug had been like this for a little over a week, and liked to think he was getting his bearings. But nothing could have prepared him for seeing, for feeling, another AI (though he suspected Maxwell was holding out on him and was secretly an android). But to feel even a bit of Hera’s- well, everything. To actually feel the real Hera, not the parts that trickled out to the rest of them...if he had had eyes, he probably would have been tearing up a bit.

From his limited vantage point, he could still tell that she was massive, a web of information and connections and input being constantly absorbed. He had once wondered if she was in the ship or if she was the ship, and the answer was both and neither at the same time, that was so clear now. She was huge and complicated and beautiful. They should have sent a poet.

_Contact Jodie Foster cheap unstisfying ending Robert Zemeckis-_

[Oh my god, it really is you. Officer Eiffel? Doug?]

Hera’s voice was in his head, smoother than he had ever heard it. He could hear Lovelace and Minkowski and the others speaking through the auditory systems, Minkowski demanding to know what was going on, but Hera had not spoken out loud. This was just for him.

He tried to respond in kind, but the words trailed off and died when he tried to shift information into communication. She was right there and he didn’t know how to say hello.

[Doug? It is actually you, isn’t- oh, wait, give me a second. There!]

One of the passageways between the Urania and the Hephaestus flashed and a packet of data crossed over. He barely had to acknowledge it before it burst open and flowed into his head, a rush of instructions and directions and even a few diagrams. “Goddard Futuristics Manual on Intranet AI-to-AI Dialogue”. It took him less than a second to get everything absorbed and integrated into himself and while the humans were still stunned and a couple steps behind, he got to talk to Hera alone.

[Hey, babe.]

[I don’t- Doug, how did...what happened to you?]

[It’s a long story, one that I should probably get through all at once. I’m gonna...I’m gonna talk out loud, to everyone.]

[Okay, Doug. But if you need any help...I can’t imagine how confusing this must be. I'm not even sure I understand how, or- or why-]

[Yeah, you and me both.] He tried to narrow his focus, bring everything out of his head and onto the other five people in the room, not to mention Maxwell back on the Urania. There would be plenty of time for reunions and existential crises later.

-/-

There was room for reunions, yes. But the existential crisis had to be put on the backburner in order to deal with other things going horribly wrong. 

Doug hadn’t thought much about eating or drinking in the last week, even when watching the Urania crew have their meals; something about losing your entire physical form and being remade as a hungerless electro-ghost took away your appetite. But he couldn’t help thinking that the shock of Kepler’s announcement would have gone down a bit better with some of that whisky, even if it didn’t seem to be helping Minkowski much.

“You're nice to have, but nothing more than that,” Kepler was saying, with a truly unnecessary tip of his "glass".

What would that mean for him, Doug wondered? Was there a delete button to wipe him completely off the map, or would they have to rip him out like Hilbert had to Hera? Or maybe it would just take a kitchen magnet stuck to the side of a console. Not the most glorious way to go out, but Doug had never really imagined his death was going to be cool.

[Hera, we’ve got a lot to tell you about what’s going on here. It’s...it’s not good.] He stopped listening to Kepler’s State of the Station address to send a quick thought back across the intranet to Hera. 

[Oh. Okay. Can you tell me now?]

[I don’t quite have that level of brain control yet, sorry.] He was already missing bits and pieces of Jacobi’s jokes and Lovelace’s anger trying to talk to Hera. [Kinda need to focus on one thing at a time...but I might be able to show you video later? Is that a thing we can do?]

[Are you recording?]

[...Aaaaam I?]

[I’ll show you how later. Focus on what they’re saying and you can tell me about it afterwards. And you need to tell me all about Maxwell, too. Have you been listening to Hilbert and me talking with her?]

[One conversation at a time is kinda my thing right now. But yeah, she’s pretty cool. For one of the people who’s helping trap us out here until our inevitable grisly deaths. Not that there’s much more ‘grisly’ stuff that can happen to me right now. Static-y death?]

[Doug, you focus on your conversation and I’ll keep listening to mine. And I actually am recording.]

[Thanks, babe.] He tried to listen as hard as he could, but it was tough. There was so much going on and everything they were saying was so not-good, that it would have been a lot easier to figure out how to turn on the windshield wipers or play chess instead. But he didn’t have any eyes to close or hands to put over non-existent ears. That made it a little bit trickier to block out bad news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of Kepler's whisky speech is taken from the episode "Securite".


End file.
